Time to turn off the laptop, pack up the bag, bundle into a taxi, and head out for the Capital Airport for my flight back to the US.  It could be an eventful trip.  You see, there is a giant Sino-African summit meeting now underway here in Beijing, and, in order to insure that all the various heads of state can move about efficiently, the road to the airport is closed to regular traffic for most of the daylight hours today.  That means that my cab will have to take alternate routes, which will be more roundabout and traffic-jammed.  What should be a half hour trip or so, could well turn into an adventure.  I’ll have to leave a couple of hours open to make sure I get there in time to check in.

    Speaking of the African Summit, I should give credit where it is due.  I was critical of China Daily in my previous post.  But today at breakfast I saw a story there about a man from Congo who married a Chinese woman, and they now have two sons (I cannot find the story on the CD web page…).   There is a picture of the happy family on page three.  I think this is an important image.  China, like so many places in the world, has its share of racial prejudices, and such biases are often at their worst when it comes to sex and relationships.  Way back in 1988 I was in Nanjing when Chinese students their rioted and protested over African men dating Chinese women. 

    So, it is good that China Daily is promoting a more humane and open- minded notion of African-Chinese "relations."  I have not looked in the local Chinese-language papers this morning to see if that image is carried forward there.   

    And there is a point here for the modern (postmodern) adaptation of Confucianism: race does not matter when it comes to Humanity.  Africans are as capable of achieving the status of "gentlemen" as any other group.  What matters is the daily performance of ethical behavior, especially the careful cultivation of our closest loving relationships.  There is no relevance for race in determining the moral attainments of an individual.  And let me push it a step further, just to incite discussion if nothing else: if Chinese-ness, from an ancient Confucian perspective, is determined by how well an individual enacts his social duties, and thus non-Han people (i.e. those who were not "ethnically" Chinese) can become "Chinese," then, in a modern extension of these terms, Africans, should they so want to, can be Chinese.

     I will leave you with that thought and check in when I get home.

     Yi Hui’r (that’s a Beijing accent) Jian!